Personal Appearance

Personal Appearance

Rev. Charles E. Coughlin of Royal Oak, Mich, likes to wave his hand toward the filing cases containing the names of all those whom his radio-voice has incited to write to him. He likes to say: "The 8,000,000 members of my National Union for Social Justice. . . ." Yet the best likeness this radiorator ever saw of his 8,000,000 followers was the face of a microphone. Last week in Detroit's Olympia Auditorium he attempted a new adventure: to meet his followers in the flesh.*

Object of Priest Coughlin's personal appearance was to convert his filing case audience into a working political organization. The Detroit gathering was to be the first of a series of organization meetings. Father Coughlin told a newshawk: "It's got to be done, and if I fail it means annihilation for me. ... At the least sign of slowing up, my enemies inside and out-side the Church would nail me. They wouldn't pay much attention to the sportsman's code about shooting a sitting bird."

As Priest Coughlin & retinue (including Senators Nye and Elmer Thomas) came to the platform great was the ovation. The hall, with 15,000 people in it, was nearly full but there was no overflow audience. First, the evening's hero let his sponsors spellbind the crowd. Applause and cheers came liberally, turning to hisses when Priest Coughlin's Washington lobbyist, Louis B. Ward, referred to "a certain kept General, Hugh S. Johnson." It was 11 p. m. before Priest Coughlin's turn arrived but the audience was still enthusiastic.

Faced with a flesh & blood audience, Priest Coughlin skipped the first six pages of a 19-page speech which he had given to the Press in advance.

"Tonight," he cried, "I invited the laborer and the farmer, the small business man and the small merchant, the disorganized of every class, each to grasp the spear shaft of union, the shaft of solidarity, and with perfectly timed thrusts, with amalgamated strength, to push that spear point through the breastplate of our common ills into the very heart of the concentration of wealth. . . .

"We reject atheistic Communism. We disavow racial Hitlerism. We turn our backs upon industrial Fascism. We insist upon a legislature as the Fathers of our country created it, not under the dictatorship of a President, not under the dictatorship or the fear of a high commissioner of prostituted patronage which tends to make America a one-party government. We are not organized to compete with the old parties. But we are organizing under a definite necessity to blast out of existence the reactionaries, the threadbare conservatives and the hypocrites who disgrace the halls of Congress as they impede the movement towards the goal of social justice."

The measures behind which he placed his union-but-not-a-party consisted mainly of bills bearing the names of his sponsors on the platform--Senator Nye's war-without-profit bill, Senator Thomas' bill to guarantee farmers their crop-production costs, Representative Lemke's farm mortgage bill, Representative Sweeney's bill "to drive the money changers from the temple." To these he added for good measure the Wagner Labor Disputes Bill and the Administration's utilities holding company bill. For each one, his audience applauded vigorously. Having progressed from Page 7 to Page 12 of his manuscript, Priest Coughlin stopped as abruptly as he had begun.

"You're organized as the Michigan chapter!" he cried to his audience. Then to round after round of applause he marched off the stage, sweating freely.

From the rostrum to several days of seclusion marched Priest Coughlin. If he read what political observers had to say about his big act, he must have been disappointed. Most positive was Correspondent Joseph Cookman of the liberal New York Post: "To most of his audience, the failure to arrive at any definite results such as they had been led to expect, was puzzling. To the insiders it was little short of tragic. . . . Father Coughlin had called an organization meeting and had no program for anything except a rally."

Priest Coughlin did not perform at his usual radio hour four days later. Instead he had a lieutenant explain vaguely that his union "now entered its third phase of development, from a school of one teacher to a school of many teachers, but with a curriculum unchanged."

In Washington, Priest Coughlin's rally got two prominent mentions. In the Senate, North Carolina's Josiah W. Bailey, broke off in the midst of a speech to exclaim: "When a minister of the Gospel or a minister of a church comes down into the political arena and goes out with his radio incendiarism to stir up the fountains of hate in a distressed land amongst a suffering people, I take it nothing amiss and I make no apologies, but I will snatch the halo from his brow and throw it into the nearest spittoon, and then throw the spittoon into the gutter."

Huey Long's reaction was to sweep the Coughlin program into his own egg basket: "I think Father Coughlin has a damn good platform and I'm 100% for him. . .. What he says is right down my alley."

* His Detroit meeting was not, however, Priest Coughlin's first encounter with a large audience-in-the-flesh. Year ago at Des Moines he addressed the Farmers' Holiday Association. In November 1933, in Manhattan's Hippodrome he spoke to 7,000 people assembled by members of the Committee for the Nation (inflation), told them to "stop Roosevelt from being stopped."

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